Thursday, October 7, 2010

Eva von Dassow's comments at the October 7 rally

This university has a mission: it is to advance learning and the search for truth, and to share knowledge, understanding, and creativity with the community and the world.You came here to participate in this mission.

Students, when you applied for admission, you used test scores and GPAs to earn your place here – and most likely to earn a scholarship, too, since tuition and fees keep rising out of reach.You borrow money to help pay for courses that are worth certain numbers of credits, you earn more test scores and grades, you put your credit hours into the degree bank of one program or another, and once you’ve dropped enough of this currency into the education-vending machine, it gives you a degree.You hope that degree will purchase you gainful employment: a job that pays you enough to pay the debt the degree cost you.The value of your education is thus measured in numbers, dollars, and time.

The faculty who teach you are measured in the same terms: by the number of credit hours we teach, the numbers of students our courses enroll, the number of majors in our programs.We are also measured by the number of publications we produce, the number and amount of grants we win, even by formulas to calculate our monetary merit relative to each other.Our salaries are determined through market mechanisms whereby greater or lesser value is ascribed to different disciplines based on how much profit they may generate.The more we “produce” the more valuable we are, in dollars.Elsewhere in the educational system there are plans to evaluate and pay teachers on the basis of their students’ grades and test scores.This is accountability in the form of accounting: put the M&Ms in here, insert tuition, and you get the same M&Ms out here, and that is supposed to be good value for your educational dollar.

Where in this model lies the search for truth?Where are the principles of scientific inquiry, the ideals of scholarship, the foundations of a free society?Does this vending machine have a button for ideas?For understanding?For creativity?

’Fraid not, folks: money is the sole criterion of value here.Education’s not the thing, it’s capital that’s king – and that’s you, students!You’re the human capital the university must develop for the global economy!It’s not your learning potential but your earning potential that matters!Credits, courses, research, degrees, all are fungible quanta, expressed in the form of money.And time equals money, as we know – so get on the assembly line, human capital, and develop without delay!Four years to graduation, no more, ’cos if you stay here longer you’re occupying the place of another future debtor!

This vision of education and research is the soul of the administration’s “Strategic Positioning Initiative,” which strives to manipulate enrollment figures, graduation rates, faculty productivity, and ratios of majors to programs in the service of positioning the institution higher in numerical rankings.You’d think aiming to be one of the top three public research universities in the world would mean you get the best classes tuition can buy; no, it means the U pushes you through faster to raise its 4-year graduation rate. It hasn’t worked: we’re eleventh out of the Big 10 – and losing.

We the Faculty for the Renewal of Public Education have a different vision.Today’s mania for metrics converts all scholarly, creative, and scientific work into money while reducing students to indebted units of human capital.But education, knowledge, and inquiry are immeasurable goods: not commodities for purchase, but the inherent property of all who teach and learn.We strive to restore intellectual and ethical values to the academic enterprise, and to reclaim the university for the public.

Eva von Dassow, on behalf of Faculty for the Renewal of Public Education

RECLAIM THE U!

As the administration has come to dominate instead of to serve the university, intellectual and educational values have been displaced by market ones like "efficiency" and "productivity." Faculty and students have been commensurately marginalized in the governance of the institution. We do not say that the university ought to be inefficient or unproductive, but we do demand that values central to scholarly and scientific inquiry and education be restored to the center of the university's endeavors, including (indeed, especially) the management of its finances. Our efforts have a fivefold focus:

1. Governance. The university should be governed by those who carry out its mission of teaching, research, and public service. At present faculty have little meaningful role in making decisions that are handed down from central administration. This state of affairs results from manifold causes, faculty in generations gone by having ceded governance responsibilities to an ever-growing body of administrators. We the faculty must resume our proper role in making, rather than merely reacting to, the decisions that govern our work and our workplace.

2. Transparency in budgeting. The administration should make all information about the university's finances, including expenditures as well as revenue sources, readily available to the public in comprehensible form. At present it is difficult or even impossible to find out how the university spends most of the funds at its disposal, effectively prohibiting people without privileged access and knowledge from scrutinizing the administration's allocation of financial resources. (N.B.: All these resources are public funds once they enter the land-grant institution's coffers.) We recommend an independent audit to open the university's budget to such scrutiny.

3. Accountability for the administration. Every office within central administration should be required to provide to the public an account of what it does, what relation its work bears to the university's mission, and why it costs what it does.

4. Workload. The administration demands greater "productivity" from faculty and staff at the same time that it reduces the resources we need to produce anything and increases the burdens that hamper our work. If resources are withdrawn, our workload must be reduced, not increased. We do not want to do less teaching or less research, rather, we demand that unfunded mandates handed down by the administration be eliminated. Meanwhile, adequate support must be provided to enable efficient and productive work.

5. Integrity of the university. We reject the notion that the university can somehow achieve excellence by cutting programs, faculty positions, and curriculum. All disciplines and all modes of inquiry are interrelated, whether directly or distantly; to excise one element affects others, and ultimately damages the whole. This principle of intellectual integration is encapsulated in the motto of the University of Minnesota, commune vinculum omnibus artibus, which is a phrase derived from the argument of Cicero that the study of poetry is essential to a career in law. To unbind the arts from one another, as if any form of human inquiry can stand in isolation from every other, violates not merely the motto but the principle of the University's existence.